Popular low cost cloud storage company Backblaze recently shared their hard drive failure rates for 2016 and to no surprise, HGST is once again the most reliable HDD maker.

According to the stats, Backblaze has a total of 71,939 HDDs in their datacenter and 1,225 of them failed in 2016. Most of the failures came from Seagate’s 4TB ST4000DM000 drives which saw 938 of the 34,738 drives fail over the year with an average age of 21.73 months.

Aggregating all the hard drive failures by manufacturer, the hard drive maker with the least failure rates once again was HGST which only experienced a failure rate of 0.60%. The drivemaker with the [...]

WD recently launched the HGST branded Ultrastar SN200 and SS200 series Enterprise NVMe SSDs.

The Ultrastar SN200 series, which is available in HHHL or SFF 2.5″ form factors will be offered in capacities of 800GB to 7.68TB. What’s most impressive here is performance as the flagship drive features sequential read performance up to 6.1GB/s and random read performance up to 1.2 Million IOPS, a massive 100% increase in sequential reads and 61% increase random reads over their last generation drive.

In addition to the Ultrastar SS200 series, WD is also introducing the HGST branded Ultrastar SS200 SAS Enterprise SSDs. Available in the SFF 2.5″ [...]

While SSDs are quickly replacing HDDs in both the consumer and enterprise space, HDDs are still less expensive per gigabyte compared to its solid state competition and is still very cost effective for applications where high capacity is needed, but performance isn’t paramount.

At Western Digital’s Investor Day 2016, WD recently launched their new 4th Generation He12 Helium HDD which features an eight-disk design.  This is achieved through the use of their HelioSeal process technology which uses helium in the drive to allow WD to utilize thinner disks thanks to helium’s significantly lighter density.

As such, WD is able to deliver up to [...]

When we first started covering the world of SSDs back in 2012, the industry was still in its infancy. At the time, the performance benefits of SSD technology were clearly greater than HDDs, but due to high prices, low capacities, and incomplete OS support, it just simply wasn’t the time.

However, fast forward to 2016 and today the SSD landscape is a much different place than it was almost 5 years ago. Prices are much less expensive, capacities now reach up to 4TB in a single drive, and modern operating systems such as Windows 10 fully support SSDs right out of the box.

As such, here are 6 of the top reasons why you should buy a SSD [...]

With the introduction of more power efficient CPUs and GPUs along with the introduction of more flexible storage form factors such as M.2, the once massive gaming laptop is now significantly smaller. Over the past couple years, MSI has been among the pioneers of the new trend of ever shrinking gaming laptops, introducing an array of portable systems including the GS70, GS60, GS30 and now the GS40.

Today we’ll be reviewing MSI’s latest GS40 Phantom which is the 14″ variant of MSI’s GS series of gaming laptops. The GS series gaming laptops have always been portable gaming notebooks with high [...]

Way back at CES 2014, Valve made a huge splash at the show announcing their intent to popularize PC gaming in the living room. In order to do this, Valve was building a custom Steam OS which would either be installed by an end user to their own gaming PC, or be bundled with Steam Machines – Valve approved gaming PCs manufactured by their PC OEM partners.

While Valve and their PC OEM partners created a lot of hype during the show, the Steam Machine concept has pretty much fizzled out in the past year as Steam have made no big announcements regarding the status of their Steam OS or Steam Machines. With [...]

Over the past few years, Western Digital has been on a shopping spree for flash storage vendors, snapping up a number of big names in the industry including STEC, Velobit, and Virident all in the last year alone. To add to their growing portfolio, Western Digital subsidiary HGST recently acquired Skyera as well for an undisclosed sum.

“Western Digital and Skyera have had a long-term strategic partnership. By combining Skyera’s innovative flash platform with HGST’s leading solid-state storage solutions and flash virtualization software we plan to provide breakthrough value and capabilities to help customers transform their cloud and enterprise [...]

Several weeks ago, Seagate announced that had begun shipping the world’s first 8TB HDDs, taking the high capacity crown from HGST’s 6TB Ultrastar He6 helium filled HDDs unveiled in late 2013. Although it was a valiant effort made by Seagate, it seems like HGST had another trick up their sleeve.

Earlier this week, HGST announced the world’s first 10TB HDD, effectively taking back the capacity crown from Seagate for the time being.

In order to reach the magical 10TB capacity, HGST is employing two key technologies – HelioSeal and SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording). HelioSeal is one of HGST’s next generation HDD manufacturing [...]

With the amount of data we’re consuming expanding on an exponential level, the demand for storage by both end users and big businesses has been increasing by leaps and bounds.

After being stuck at the 4TB since 2011, WD subsidiary HGST unveiled the world’s first 6TB HDD, the 6TB HGST Ultrastar He6 late last year thanks to their use of helium technology. By using helium, HGST was able to cram a staggering seven platters into a single 3.5″ HDD achieving the 6TB capacity. Of course, Seagate wasn’t going to let this go unanswered as earlier this year, they unveiled their very own 6TB HDD using no helium and just standard PMR (Perpendicular [...]

According to a press release, HGST recently announced a new HHHL PCIe SSD, the FlashMAX III PCIe Accelerator designed for performance intensive enterprise applications such as databases, big data, video production applications, etc.

In terms of specs, the HGST FlashMax III is expected to be available in capacities of up to 2,200GB (2.2TB) with performance up to 531,000 IOPS random read and 59,000 IOPS random write. Sequential read/writes max out at 2,700/1,400 MB/s with the drive running off a PCIe 3.0 x8 interface.

The HGST FlashMax III will carry an endurance rating of 2 DWPD for 5 years and is expected to be available sometime in Q4 this year. No [...]